Halloween forces me to confront two things about me: I hate mass consumer marketing towards young children and I hate being confronted with the expectation to perform as a Halloween-loving mother to my children.

When I was child-free, I harbored this nebulous concept that I would someday have kids. I was also much more preoccupied with trying not to get pregnant for most of my adult life thus far, so a progression to trying to become pregnant seemed…unnatural.

As an Asian American teacher working in a public school with predominantly black and brown students, I’m placed again in a complicated racial hierarchy that doesn’t like to name itself. I am rather anomalous in Harlem, but as a teacher of the African American Civil Rights Movement, I am freakish. Once I referred to myself as a person of color, only to be greeted with an involuntary snort from one of my students.